#daddy-o

*slap* 🫱 〰️ 🍎

Speaking of: I am watching the fan-voted top-100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting. Today's episode that finally finished the current knitting project of MST3Knitathon episode was:

54. Episode 307 Daddy-O

Summary: We start with a short! Alphabet Antics, a notoriously bizarre educational film where a narrator with a very soothing voice does an odd free-verse rhyme over footage meant to represent each letter of the alphabet. I can only assume that the short makers had access to some stock footage but no budget to film new material and so had to make whatever they already had fit random letters. We start and end normally with A is for Airplane (sure) and Z is for Zebra (what else?). But in between, they are forced to stretch their parade footage over L (Large balloons), M (Marching), N (floats featuring Nursery rhymes) and X (Santa's sleigh arriving at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to usher in the "X-mas" season)(I suppose there's only so much you can do when you don't have stock footage of a xylophone). You would think, couldn't they have done B is for Balloon and F is for Float? But no, they had footage of African people in traditional dress rowing a boat, so they needed to do B is for Boat, and some unsettlingly sped up footage of kids on a playground brought them F is for Fun. And the X-mas thing isn't even their worst stretch: we also have Q is for the Queer, queer pelican; I is for whether or not the president is In the White House; T is for bear cubs Trying to drink from bottles on a clothesline that is too high for them; and worst of all, O is for Once there was a buffalo* (*actually a bison) who couldn't pull a farmer's plow, but an elephant and a camel could. (As Tom Servo puts it, "O is for Once? Was there a writiers' strike?")

In the movie proper, we have a rare 1950s proto-example of reverse-gender negging as a rich girl named Janna pursues a handsome young truck driver named Phil by repeatedly swerving in front of his vehicle to force him off the road and then calling him a bad driver when he yells at her for reckless endangerment. She also disparages his talent at his singing side-hustle. But when Phil's best friend Sonny is forced off the road into a firey crash along the same canyon where Janna forced Phil to swerve in front of a speed trap during a drag race (resulting in a license suspension), the two of them team up to learn who really murdered Sonny by infiltrating an incompetent two man drug ring.

Fun fact: The music for this movie was composed by a young and just-starting-out John Williams! (Yes, that John Williams)

MST3K lore or notable moments: The Miracle Grow Baby from the previous episode Time of the Apes (number 32 on our watch list) is still in Deep 13. He breaks the button that starts the end credits by getting mashed carrot on it, causing multiple false starts as the credits begin playing only to cut back to Deep 13. I think I counted 5 or 6 cutbacks before Dr. F remembered an alternate keyboard shortcut and the credits finally played in full. (Also, either Gerry or Sylvia appeared during one of the cutbacks, delivering a pizza that it took him or her 30 days to burrow down to Deep 13 with)

What do I think about its place on the list? I love the short, and the end gag with the button coming unstuck just gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes on. The movie's in a weird gray zone where it's just competent enough to be actively annoying at times, but it is at least pretty short, and I enjoyed the Best Brains crew's repeat mocking of one of its most bizarre scenes: Phil suspects Janna of having caused Sonny's crash by running him off the road as she's repeatedly done to Phil, so he breaks into her garage to examine her car for damage. She enters eating an apple; he accuses her of murdering his best friend; she coolly holds out her already bitten apple and asks, "Want some?"; he slaps the apple away and grabs her roughly; and she finally takes him seriously enough to point out that the damage to her car would be on the opposite fender if she'd gotten it causing Sonny's accident. It's supposed to establish Janna as a tough girl uncowed by male posturing and Phil as the one guy macho enough to really stand up to her, but as in their other scenes together, it just makes Janna look unreasonably abrasive and Phil uncomfortably prone to manhandling women in order to exert control, and both the Satellite of Love crew and the Mads parody it wonderfully.

Side-note: In the comments on previous posts, we've discussed the perception that the humor got nastier/more bigoted in the Sci-fi Channel era of the show than during the Joel years. In the previous post, we called out the transphobia and misogyny of all the jokes made about Marge looking like a man in drag. In this episode, Joel makes a series of jokes claiming that one of the minor female characters looks like Lou Reed from the Velvet Underground. And it's an interesting contrast, because in one sense it's the same joke - this woman looks like a man - but it feels less nasty as Joel rambles on about which album cover specifically he thinks she resembles and the career of Lou Reed. And I'm sitting here wondering how much the jokes in Incredibly Strange Creatures actually were more offensive, or to what extent I might be cutting Joel too much slack simply because his off-beat, laid-back delivery style feels less pointed and therefore less mean. I still feel like one is actively offensive and the other is more on the "problematic" and "in very poor taste" end of the spectrum, but I have trouble evaluating how fair I'm being in that judgement. Please weigh in with your own thoughts if you have them!

Chuck D is back with his first solo single in seven years and it's a collaboration with Daddy-O called "New Gens." The new song is included on his next solo album, Radio Armageddon. The Public Enemy co-founder and Daddy-O, who founded Stetsasonic, the first hip-hop group to use a full band, rap about the current generation of rappers. The two rap pioneers share their perspectives on contemporary artists and what it means to be a legend. Chuck D makes sure to send them love at the end of each verse. The video is a collection of vintage scenes from hip-hop and the two of them interspersed in between the footage of those early days of New York City b-boys and b-girls.

Chuck D's last solo effort was Celebration of Ignorance, which came out in 2018. It was only five years ago that Public Enemy released the critically acclaimed What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? Radio Armageddon has guest appearances from Philadelphia legends Schoolly D and Phil Most Chill; Donald D and Jazzy Jay of the Zulu Nation; hip-hop's first hypewoman, 1/2 pint, NYC's Miranda Writes; and artists from Chuck D's SpitSLAM label: The Impossebulls and Blak Madeen. Radio Armageddon comes out on May 18th and can be preordered now.